A high-density elevation point cloud is desired for many topographic mapping applications. LIDAR is one of a few technologies available today that can produce such a point cloud. A point cloud is a set of vertices in a multiple-dimensional coordinate system. These vertices are usually defined at least by x, y, and z coordinates, and can be numbered in the billions. Having this much data to work with is a blessing, but also turns out to be a blight that frustrates computational, transmissive, and storage plans for these topographic mapping applications.